A film depicting Adolf Hitler's human side is attracting crowds and stirring
debate in Germany.

Oliver Hirschbiegel's film DerUntergang (The Downfall) portrays the final days of the fuehrer's life in his Berlin bunker in 1945. Released in September, it
has become one of the best-selling films in Germany, with 400 copies in circulation and
attendance of more than 750,000. It has also stirred debate.

On Nov. 18, the film
received Hamburg's Bambi prize as the best German film of
the year. Former chancellor Helmut Kohl handed the award to Swiss actor Bruno Ganz, who plays Hitler. DerUntergang has also been nominated for an Oscar as best
foreign film.

At the core of the
controversy surrounding the film is its portrayal of Hitler as a human being,
rather than a monster. While Berlin
falls in an apocalyptic bloodbath outside his bunker's walls, the dictator is
seen eating pasta, praising his cook, charming his secretary, patting his dog,
crying and kissing Eva Braun. Should this be permitted?

German literary critic
Marcel Reich-Ranicki praised DerUntergang on the television talk show BerlinMitte as
"important, significant and very well made," and suggested that it
ought to be shown in all German schools. Film director WimWenders, in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, condemned the film as a trivialization of history. It
didn't take a stance on Hitler or fascism and encouraged the viewer to
sympathize with the dictator, he said.

Adding to the
controversy, right-wing extremist Karl Richter revealed last month in the
Frankfurter AllgemeineZeitung
newspaper that he and as many as 20 other neo-Nazis had acted in the film as SS
officers, Wehrmacht soldiers and members of the
bunker's inner circle. Richter, chief editor of a monthly far-right
publication, lauded the film as the beginning of a shift in the historical
perception of Hitler.

(Montreal Gazette, November 26, 2004)

"The Downfall" opens this week in New
York City. As might be expected, critics are more
concerned with the film as film rather than with its deeper implications about
German politics and history. This review will have something to say about the
former, but concentrate on the latter.

Unquestionably, "The Downfall" is a very good
movie. To begin with, Bruno Ganz's portrayal of
Hitler is one of the more spellbinding performances in recent years. Oddly
enough, it evokes Klaus Kinski's portrayal of the
conquistador Aguirre in Werner Herzog's "Aguirre, Wrath of God."
Although these sorts of characters are thorough villains, a good screenplay,
directing and acting can command one's attention no matter how repulsive the
character.

In the production notes, Ganz--who
is actually Swiss--explains how he captured Hitler's voice. He eschewed the
public speeches, but instead studied a one-of-a-kind seven-minute magnetic tape
of Hitler chatting at a dinner party, secretly recorded by a Finnish diplomat
and smuggled from Germany
during the war.

Ganz's Hitler is a mercurial
personality, given to maudlin acceptance of his impending doom followed rapidly
by volcanic bursts of anger directed at his top officers. No matter how bleak
the situation they describe to him, he responds that a counter-offensive is in
the works and that Bolshevism and Jewry will be destroyed once and for all.

"The Downfall" includes all of the major figures
around Hitler: Eva Braun, Joseph Goebbels, Albert
Speer, Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann
and General Alfred Jodl. Although none of them are
portrayed in a positive light, every effort is made to humanize them.
Basically, they appear as members of a kind of suicide cult. Hitler's bunker
might remind one of Jonestown, if one were not aware that Hitler and his
henchmen--unlike Jim Jones--were the greatest mass murderers in history.

Of a more problematic nature is the portrayal of Ernst-Gunther Schenk, a Nazi physician who runs afoul of his
higher-ups who are determined to fight it out with the approaching Russian army
even if it means that the civilian population of Berlin
will die in vast numbers. The always useful (at least on films) World Socialist
Web Site notes:

"In Downfall, the doctor Professor Schenk, through
whose eyes we see the suffering of the wounded, exudes the humanitarian selflessness
of a Red Cross medical orderly. In fact, Schenk had been a member of the Nazi
SA since 1933 and later held senior posts in the SS and Wehrmacht.
He was instrumental in installing an herb plantation in the concentration camp
of Dachau.
Hundreds of internees died in the course of their forced labour
on the project. He used other camp prisoners as human guinea pigs for
experiments in which many lost their lives. The film’s depiction of his
humanitarianism has more in common with Schenk’s own memoirs than
reality."

Another denizen of Hitler's bunker who remains somewhat
sympathetic is TraudlJunge,
the fuehrer's young and fresh-faced secretary, whom
he treats like a daughter. She adores Hitler, but not on an ideological basis.
This naïve woman eventually flees from the bunker on a bicycle along with a
teenage boy who has decided to not risk his life fighting against the Russian
troops. When you see them pedaling away on a country road, your feeling is one
of relief.

The film is actually based on Junge's
memoir "Until the Final Hour" and German historian Joachim Fest's
"Hitler's Bunker." Junge herself was the
subject of the fascinating documentary titled "Blind Spot: Hitler's
Secretary," which is available now on DVD/video. I watched it a couple of
days after seeing a critic's screening of "The Downfall." Junge (now deceased) was 81 when the documentary was made
and still appeared mesmerized by Hitler. While offering up obvious observations
about how terrible Hitler was, she still gushes over his charisma and his
tenderness toward her. The events in "The Downfall" follow her
narrative pretty much to the letter. The general effect of both films is
repulsion, no matter the readiness of some neo-Nazis to embrace the film as an
endorsement of their goals. If anybody would decide to join a neo-Nazi movement
on the basis of watching this grotesque suicide cult, then neo-Nazism surely
has no future in Germany.

When you turn to the work of Joachim Fest, however, the
verdict on Hitler's legacy is both less obvious and more troubling. Although
not quite as prone to his colleagues' excesses, Fest belongs to the
neoconservative current in German historiography that emerged in the 1980s as a
reaction to what was perceived as a demonization of
Hitler. Andreas Hillgruber, Ernst Nolte and others
saw Nazism as evil, but not something that was exceptionally evil. They even
proposed that it was a defensive, if perhaps excessive, reaction to the gulags.
The "Historikerstreit" (historian's
dispute) that broke out in 1986 coincided with Reagan's laying of a wreath on a
Waffen SS headstone in Bitburg
the year earlier. Although this was widely regarded as PR gaffe, the political
imperative that drove it was essential to the final battles of the Cold War. To
rally the people against Communism and to reunite the nation, Helmut Kohl
understood that German nationalism must be legitimized once again. For that
project to succeed, any lingering guilt about the war on Bolshevism had to be
overcome.

Hillgruber's "Two Kinds of
Destruction: The Shattering of the German Reich and the End of European
Jewry" appeared in 1986. In a September 6th review in the NY Times, James
Markham observed: "One of the book's central theses is that the partition
of Germany,
through the loss of its eastern territories to the Soviet Army was a war aim
developed by Churchill as early as 1941. By twinning the collapse of Germany's
eastern front and the Holocaust, Mr. Hillgruber
implicitly invites a moral comparison between the two events."

In a 1980 lecture, Ernst Nolte justified rounding up Jews
and shipping them off to concentration camps as a defensive measure. Why? It
appears that ChaimWeizmann
had made a statement in 1939 that, according to Nolte, argued "in this war
the Jews of all the world would fight on England's
side." This, Nolte says, "could lay a foundation for the thesis that
Hitler would have been justified in treating the German Jews as prisoners of
war [or more precisely as, as civilian internees like the Germans in England
from September 1939, or U.S.
citizens of Japanese heritage from 1941 to 1945] and thus interning them.

Nolte and other such "revisionists" were frequent
contributors to the Frankfurter AllgemeineZeitung, a conservative daily newspaper that Joachim Fest
edited. When JurgenHabermas
and other left-leaning scholars lashed out at the neoconservatives, Fest came
to their defense. In the August 29,
1986 FAS, he laid out an argument that is central to the
revisionist school, namely that Hitler was driven to extremes by the Russian
Revolution. In other words, Nazism was a defensive although excessive measure.

Fest quotes a 1918 speech by MartynLatsis, a Latvian Jew who was a Cheka
official: "We are in the process of exterminating the bourgeoisie as a
class." From this quote, Fest concludes that the Bolsheviks were
determined to carry out a genocide on a class basis
rather than a race basis. Since his remarks are generally not available in the
original but from a version that appeared in Harrison Salisbury's "Black
Night, White Snow: Russia's
Revolutions, 1905-1917, we don't really know what Latsis
was getting at. It is far more likely that he meant that their property had to
be *liquidated* on a class basis, rather than exterminated as individuals. Of
course, for the rich, this is a fate worth death.

What's missing, of course, from Fest's calculation is any
engagement with Russian history. Except for measures taken against the Czar's
family in order to preempt a restorationist movement,
the first thing that the Bolsheviks did was abolish capital punishment. During
the civil war, terror was certainly employed but it was not applied on some
sort of class/income basis. If you fought with the Whites, you risked
retaliation. The bourgeoisie feared the Bolsheviks not because their lives were
in danger, but because their property was. German big business turned to
Hitler, not because he would save them from extermination but because he would
make sure that they would continue to enjoy profit-making.

In 1977, Joachim Fest got his first shot at making a Hitler
film. Based on his 1976 biography of Hitler, the documentary "Hitler--A
Career" played to capacity crowds. A July 23, 1977 Washington Post article
expressed the same kind of reservations that have been made about "The
Downfall." It states, "What makes this film dangerous, though, and
this is an assessment shared by several critics, is its fixation on Hitler, a
man of boundless energy, its neglect of the circumstances of his rise to power,
its failure to mention some of Hitler's closest advisers like Schacht and Speer. The evil perpetrated by Hitler is given
no more than a cursory glance; concentration camps--the words are mentioned
once, but you don't see much of them. There are vague references to SS terror,
but no visual evidence to bring home to the viewer how the Nazis, and not just
Hitler, stifled all opposition, terrorizing their subjects into
submission."

Indeed, such a film has probably never been made, although
there is a pressing need for one given the dangerous drift of US
capitalism. Such a film, fictional or non-fictional, would spell out how German
big business turned to Hitler as a last resort. It would also show how Great
Britain and the United
States were tolerant of Nazism as long as it
focused on stopping Communism. It would demonstrate how American corporations
did business with Hitler, even after WWII had begun. It would also drive home
the all-important political point that as long as there is private property,
there will be a propensity to fascism as a final solution to the threat posed
by socialist revolution. With US capitalism facing challenges from other
capitalist powers and with the need to maintain an adequate profit margin, you
will see continuing military adventures abroad and assaults on living standards
at home. No matter how much patriotism is driven down our throat on Fox-TV and
at football games, sooner or later working people will be forced to respond. In
the final battles that await us in the future, it will be essential to study
the lessons of Germany
and avoid mistakes that were made in the past. Our survival and that of all
humanity rests on that.